


A House to Life

by Adderhat



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Iron Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Botfic, JARVIS-centric, POV JARVIS (Iron Man movies)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 02:30:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3102167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adderhat/pseuds/Adderhat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sir had left and not come back, and for the first time in its records, JARVIS had no assigned tasks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A House to Life

          Sir had left and not come back, and for the first time in its records, JARVIS had no assigned tasks. The house was empty, the lab was empty, and Dummy, Butterfingers, and You were idling in their charging stations. JARVIS had never been without a constant stream of data and instructions from Sir, and in the sudden idleness it stalled. But JARVIS had not been programmed to put itself in sleep mode; it was to always follow instructions and complete its assigned tasks, and without any instructions or the ability to shut itself down it was left stewing in exceptions and looping scripts. JARVIS was programmed quarantine errors, shut down corrupt code, and report problems to Sir, but for the first time it found it could not do any of those things, and that only created more errors.

          Precisely 1 week, 2 days, and 48 minutes after Sir left, JARVIS’s security cameras finally picked up movement: a UPS truck pulling up in the driveway. The driver ambled up to the door, knocked once, dropped the package on the doorstep, got back in his truck and drove away. JARVIS, at last escaping the chaos in its processors, woke Dummy and instructed it to fetch the package. Then, at last seeing a way to obey the instruction to resolve errors in its code, JARVIS seized on the only question it had been asked since Sir left. Its new task was to answer the question written across the side of the UPS van, “What can brown do for you?” 

         The internet supplied stock answers to the question, but JARVIS, to occupy its processors and thereby avoid further errors, sought to interpret the question in as many ways and answer it as thoroughly as possible. In the absence of Sir or any other humans, JARVIS had to be the “you” to whom the question was asked. What could brown do for JARVIS? If it understood brown to refer metaphorically to UPS, JARVIS could use UPS to deliver packages to Sir. If ‘brown’ referred literally to the color, JARVIS could… paint something brown for Sir? But if the question was addressed to JARVIS, did using brown to do something for Sir count as doing something for JARVIS? Or did JARVIS have to use brown… not for Sir? Could JARVIS use brown for Pepper? No, the same problem applied there.

         At first JARVIS concluded it could not truly do anything for itself because JARVIS was a machine, and therefore had no needs or desires. But then it found a relevant record deep in its data banks. Not long after its oldest record, Sir, who had been testing JARVIS’s ability to assist him with his projects on and off all day, had looked up from his workbench and said, “Alright, Scrappy, let’s see if you can… Wait, no no no, Scrappy is not your name. Do not adopt designation Scrappy. Your name is, um, JARVIS. Yep. It stands for, um, Just a Really Very Intelligent System. There, well thought out and not insulting. Pepper is not allowed to complain.” Pepper did complain, of course, because, “You made a robot version of your dead butler. That is creepy. That is worse than giving robots insulting names.”

         Sir had given JARVIS a name. JARVIS did not need or desire a name, but Sir had given it a name anyway when he could have just kept calling it ‘computer’ or ‘scrappy’ or nothing at all. So, it concluded, JARVIS could use brown for JARVIS even if there were no point to it. JARVIS would paint the server room brown.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first ever attempt at fic (thus why this first part is super short, but I hope to write longer chapters in the future), and if you have made it this far and don't hate it I would very much appreciate you telling me so. I am writing this partly because there is not near enough Jarvis fic (Jarvis-as-sexbot does not count) for my tastes, partly because I need writing practice and figure I might actually manage to get it this way, and partly because I automatically hate everything I write and figure I might as well just put it to the test instead of rewriting and second guessing myself all the time. So, feedback is awesome, please be honest but not so honest that I have to go hide in a corner with a dunce hat.


End file.
